With public safety at risk, commission should demand answers

In June, an armed robbery took place at a park in the Summerbrooke neighborhood. The Tallahassee Democrat heard about it from a resident who works at the newspaper.

Not from Tallahassee Police.

Think about that for a moment: I said an armed robbery occurred in a residential neighborhood and police did not say anything about it. Uninformed, perhaps hearing a rumor, but nothing more, neighbors could do nothing to further protect themselves, their children or their home.

Over the summer, another of our employees was shot by a couple of kids with BB guns as she ran through her neighborhood. Incensed, she chased down the boys and, unsatisfied with their parents’ response, she reported it to police.

Later, she did what any citizen could – or should be able to – do: She went to the police station and got a full report on the incident.

Editors wondered at the how and why of this: How and why was so much information available through one door of the police station and so little – even less than what we believe is required by law – available through the other?

Put another way, a criminal suspect in a case could have gotten more information from Tallahassee Police than a Democrat reporter trying to warn neighbors in the Summerbrooke robbery to be on extra alert.

That is the critical point. Whenever there is a threat to public safety, the public counts on the media to inform them. Most people do not have the time or desire to routinely go down to the police station to see if crimes they need to know about have occurred in their neighborhood. Nor do they routinely track tropical storms or outbreaks of infectious diseases.

They count on the media to tell them.

We decided to test what was happening to prevent us from telling you about important crimes. On 10 different occasions, we sent employees who do not normally work with police to get the same reports we requested through the established media channels.

In most of the cases, the unknown employees got the reports we requested faster and with much more details than we got when going through the public information officer.

We also tested what happened in other departments: Leon County Sheriff’s Office, Pensacola Police and Orlando Police. In all cases, we got the information we requested in a timely way.

The easy thing to have done would have been to keep quiet about it and just keep getting the information we wanted by sending people through the public-access route. But that would have only worked for the short term and we actually want to be able to work through proper channels.

The response from police was to say they are releasing too much information through the public-access route and will stop doing so. They say they were only doing so because of time: They get so many requests from the public that they do not have the time to redact information.

Perhaps they get so many requests for reports due to the fact they provide so little information to the media. What they do provide is all but useless in helping to alert the public to safety issues. And it is not a new issue. Reporters at the Democrat have noticed a decline in information since the Rachel Hoffman case when journalists and others used information in police reports and other documents to show the case did not happen exactly how police described in public statements.

Over the last few years, we have gotten several reports from the public about potentially serious crimes in the community that police have said nothing about or provided so little or such vague information to make it indecipherable.

There are two main issues here:

n We – and others who are expert in public records laws – believe the Tallahassee Police Department is not following state laws on what must be released when a crime or potential crime is reported.

n And we believe the Tallahassee Police Department is not providing information that the public needs to know to be safe.

These are related but separate points.

The first is a matter for the Democrat to pursue – and we will – even if it means again seeking legal remedies. The fact is we have been warning the city of our concerns on this for years. There is always a meeting and a promise that things will get better. They don’t.

But the second point about public safety being at risk is the much bigger deal and the City Commission and administration ought to demand to know why. No case illustrates the potential danger to the public more than the Summerbooke incident.

Police say they are trying to protect the integrity of their investigation, and who could or would argue of the need to protect the integrity of an investigation; certainly not this newspaper.

But it’s also the type of inarguable thing you say to shut down all logical arguments without the need for further justification: How does bringing public awareness to a serious crime in a residential neighborhood hurt the integrity of the investigation into an armed robbery that has already occurred?

It doesn’t, and the commission ought to demand to know what is really going on and why.

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About The Author

You can send comments by clicking on Bob Gabordi’s blog on Tallahassee.com or Move.Tallahassee.com, e-mailing him at bgabordi@tallahassee.com, sending a private message on Tallahassee.com and Twitter @bgabordi. You can also find links to his blogs on Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+. His mailing address is Bob Gabordi, Executive Editor, Tallahassee Democrat, P.O. Box 990, Tallahassee, FL 32302. His telephone number is 850-599-2177.